IS MINDFULNESS HYPE OR SUBSTANCE?

Mindfulness programs are programs that aim to improve people’s intentionality, self-regulation, academic performance, and personal happiness. Mindfulness has become a popular teaching intervention in classrooms, within the last 5 years. Teachers are often encouraged to use mindfulness programs as a way to improve both academic results and the holistic well-being of students. With the rise in its popularity, there has been a rise in people and companies trying to make money off this concept, by marketing mindfulness products and programs.

I wanted to explore whether or not mindfulness was an evidence-based strategy for teachers to implement in their classrooms. Normally, I look to meta-analysis to make these types of judgments. However, while there is plenty of evidence regarding the impact of mindfulness on students’ social well being there is very little on academic performance. Indeed Camilla et al decided to explore this question in 2019 and wrote at the start of their paper “there is no direct evidence that mindfulness per se is associated with academic achievement in U.S. students.” So to inform my process, I borrowed both from a meta-analysis by Gomez-Olmedo et al from 2020, on the effect sizes of Mindfulness on social outcomes for students, and the 2019 paper by Camilla et al, which was an individual study on the effect of Mindfulness on academic results. 

Because of this difference, the data for the social outcomes are much more reliable than the data for the academic outcomes. Moreover, the Camilla et, al paper did not directly study the results of implementing a mindfulness program on academics but rather compared students’ levels of mindfulness on a MASS questionnaire score with their academic achievement. Their study looked at 2311 students between the grades of 5-8 and found a small but statistically significant benefit for mindfulness on student academic achievement.